Bibliographic Indeterminacy And The Scale Of Problems And Opportunities Of “Rights” In Digital Collection Building

"The research library community has little strong or reliable data on the number of unique books in our collections and their "rights"—for example, whether they are in the public domain or in-copyright and, if in-copyright, whether they are orphan works. At its foundation, this problem is created by the dearth of reliable bibliographic information, or what I've been calling bibliographic indeterminacy. For example, we'd like to know how large the "collective collection" of all (or even just all North American) research libraries is, and how many unique volumes research libraries hold in aggregate; otherwise, there's no way to know the cost of digitizing or caring for these materials. We'd also like to have a better handle on the question of what's in the public domain and, by extension, what's in copyright. We'd like to know how many orphan works there are, or perhaps what proportion of the digitized content we have online is likely to be orphans. And while these questions and more are regularly part of the conversation around digital collection building, they're also relevant to more conventional library problems such as print storage and particularly shared print storage. We don't know what's in the collective collection."